Woman likely bitten by shark in South Florida

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Scott Travis, Sun Sentinel

FORT LAUDERDALE - A 22-year-old South Florida woman suffered a large gash to her right leg in a likely shark attack on Sunday afternoon in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Jessica Vaughn was in surgery Sunday evening at Broward Health Medical Center. She is expected to make a full recovery, her friend Peter Hogge said.

Vaughn had been on a boat with Hogge and three other friends. The friends put on life vests and jumped into the water to go inner-tubing.

"She barely made it to the tube when she felt something hit her face. She didn't know what it was," Hogge said. "Then she looked down at her leg and knew there was a problem."

The friends called 911 and took the boat back to shore, where Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue took her to the hospital.

Hogge said Vaughn was conscious and in good spirits prior to surgery Sunday afternoon.

"She's been laughing and joking to everyone and showing her wound to everyone, from the nurses to the paramedics," he said.

Fire-rescue officials said they think this was a shark attack, but they wouldn't speculate on what species.

Hogge said he saw the tail and thinks it was about a four-foot-long bull shark.

"Nothing else would be two miles from the shore in brackish water," he said.

The bull, tiger and great white sharks are the most dangerous to people and account for the largest number of fatalities. In 2013, Florida led the country in shark bites with 23, none of which were fatal, according to the International Shark Attack File.

Most shark attacks usually happen in the ocean, not the Intracoastal, since sharks prefer salt water, said Stephen Kajiura, associate professor of biology at Florida Atlantic University. But if the incident happened just a mile or two away from the Port Everglades entrance to the Intracoastal, it's understandable that a shark swam into the area, he said.

"You were looking at two-feet high tides, so it would not be unusual for a shark to basically follow the wind of the tide and swim up into the Intracoastal," Kajiura said.

The farther away you get from a port, the less likely it is to find sharks in the fresh water canal, he said.

Kajiura said there was nothing Vaughn could have done to avoid an attack.

"It's one of those rare things that happen. No matter what you do, you can't prevent everything," he said. "There's nothing wrong [that] the woman did. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. People don't need to change their behavior because of one rare occurrence."